Paper 3340

Abstract

The status of defective intervention as a real syntactic phenomenon has been debated in the recent literature by Bruening (2014), who argues that both experiencers and adverbs do not syntactically intervene but rather disrupt the linear order of the constituents. This paper shows that Bruening's (2014) potential counterexamples to the existence of syntactic defective intervention in the case of experiencers in raising constructions are only apparent. Using data from Romance languages, two kinds of adverbs with different placement constrains are detected. The intervention of adverbs is only apparent, unlike the intervention with experiencers. Defective intervention is thus assumed to explain the experiencer facts.